Aysun Uyar Makibayashi has recently been working on global societal and environmental change issues by looking at the changing dynamics of regions, regional cooperation, and regionalism endeavors around the concepts of environmental change, sustainability, the interaction between globalization and regionalism and the impact of globalization on regions, and connection between environmental change and movement of people in regional contexts. Aysun mainly focuses on Southeast Asia, ASEAN, and East Asia. Still, she also uses a comparative approach while looking at various topics and aspects of regional cooperation in Asian, European, American, and African examples.
The key points of her research during her stay at IIAS are globalizing regions, regionalism, and comparing the cultural roots of “regions” in Asia, Europe, and Africa. By looking at regions and their changing identities, she mainly looks for the transforming identities of regions, culture within and between regions, and how regions respond to the transforming concepts of migration, human security, environmental change and governance, sustainability, and development aid. During her stay at IIAS, she specifically would like to focus on how regionalism, regionalization, and transformations of regions, particularly in Asia and Southeast Asia, are read within European regionalism and the European Union (EU) discourses.
While looking at regional environmental governance in Asia from outside of Asia, Aysun plans to analyze the sustainability aspect of regional environmental cooperation, particularly in the EU, and look for interaction points on how the recent sustainability and environmental change movements in European regional platforms can be put into practice in Asia and Southeast Asia.
Aysun is also interested in science-society interaction within the regional and international academic platforms. Science-society interface, transdisciplinarity, and sustainable transformations within national academic associations and international science-related unions, as well as science-promoting organizations, have been gaining momentum vis-à-vis the need to meet the requirements of societies for better solution-oriented approaches and methodologies. She has been looking at the transformation of the national as well as international science unions, associations, and other platforms to see how they have been redefining science within society, promoting knowledge co-production in society with other stakeholders, and reformatting their approach to science-society interaction in recent years.
In addition to her main research project on transforming regions and regionalism with global environmental and sustainability change, she would like to scrutinize how science-society interaction in the European context is taking place in various academic and science-policy-oriented circles.
https://gr.doshisha.ac.jp/gr/professors/profile_list/asian-pacific/uyar.html